President Obama and European leaders don't have a lot of options when it comes to helping Ukraine fight off Russian aggression, and Vladimir Putin knows this more than anyone. That's why he annexed the Crimean peninsula this spring after ginning up a phony referendum to show that its residents wanted to reunite with Mother Russia.

But the murder of 298 civilians aboard Malaysian Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine crosses a line that cannot be ignored. If Putin is allowed to get away with this, who knows what might be next? And other tyrants in other countries are watching the whole drama too, calculating what they can pull off and what they should avoid. The way to prevent something worse is to respond now and force Putin to stop propping up the pro-Russian separatists who committed this crime.

And there's no other explanation. The separatists don't have an air force (thank God) so the Ukrainian government isn't shooting down any of their planes. Ukraine does have an air force, however, and the separatists have been enthusiastically shooting at these planes for weeks, even downing a few. They clearly thought they had another one in their sights last week, not knowing that it was a civilian jetliner. And it goes without saying the separatists couldn't pose this threat without Russian radar systems, Russian missiles and Russian advisors.

Putin has been stoking this fire for months, either to steal more territory in eastern Ukraine or punish that nation for daring to break away when the Soviet Union collapsed. But this time his minions have gone too far, and he needs to get slapped for it.

Obama actually pushed for tough economic sanctions after the theft of Crimea, but Western European leaders waffled. Even though they bluster about human rights violations all the time, most have strong economic ties with Russia and don't want to crimp the bottom line. Maybe now they will realize that unanswered aggression leads to more problems ... like the loss of a civilian plane.

Most of the victims of this outrage were Dutch, so other European nations might finally be motivated to act. As usual, the world's only superpower (that would be us) should be at the forefront of this effort, not "leading from behind."

The West does have one option here that will get Putin's attention. Russia is scheduled to host the next World Cup in 2018, and of course soccer is a major sport for all European nations. Putin doesn't want to lose this propaganda opportunity, and he would be mortified if FIFA jerked it away. If Putin doesn't get out of eastern Ukraine after this tragedy, he should be told that the soccer stadiums and hotels he is hastily building won't be needed after all.

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Thomas Taschinger, TTaschinger@BeaumontEnterprise.com, is the editorial page editor of The Beaumont Enterprise. Follow him on Twitter at @PoliticalTom